Which of your UK pensions and ISA does India tax after you move back?

The treaty does the sorting, not your instinct. Under Article 20 of the India-UK treaty, pensions and annuities, and the UK State Pension with them, are taxable in your country of residence. So once you are an Indian resident, your State Pension, your workplace or personal pension and your SIPP drawdown are India's to tax, and the UK gives up its taxing right on a treaty claim. The State Pension is not carved into a separate rule; Article 20 defines pension to include social-security payments, so it sits with the rest.

This matters because many returnees assume the UK keeps taxing whatever a UK payer pays. It does not, for an ordinary pension. Once you claim the treaty, these are Indian-taxed at slab rates, and where UK tax was deducted before the treaty claim settled, you recover it through a foreign tax credit rather than paying twice. The India-side job is to get each pension onto the return correctly and to stop the UK taxing what the treaty gives to India.

The one real exception is a government-service pension, and the NHS is where people get it wrong. Article 19 keeps a government-service pension taxable only in the UK, so India exempts it. The instinct is that an NHS pension, being public sector, must be a government pension. For tax it usually is not: an ordinary NHS Pension Scheme pension, paid by the NHS Business Services Authority, is classified as non-government, so it falls under Article 20 and is taxable in India like any other workplace pension.

The narrow case that is UK-only is an NHS pension paid by a local authority, which does count as government service under Article 19. So the answer turns on who pays the pension, not on the NHS label. And note a difference from the usual model treaty: the India-UK Article 19 has no nationality carve-out, so a genuine government pension stays UK-only whether you hold a British or an Indian passport. Get the payer classification from your pension provider before deciding which country taxes it.

An ISA is a UK-resident wrapper, and it protects nothing once you are taxed in India. Its tax-free status exists only for a UK resident; the India-UK treaty does not exempt ISA income, and India does not recognise the wrapper. So once you are resident and ordinarily resident, India taxes the interest and the dividends inside your ISA as ordinary income at your slab rates, and the capital gains under the capital-gains rules, exactly as if the wrapper were not there.

There is a disclosure layer on top. Your ISA is a foreign asset, so it goes in Schedule FA every year once you are ordinarily resident, with no minimum value, and a missing foreign asset is a default under the Black Money Act in its own right, separate from any tax. While you are still Resident but Not Ordinarily Resident, ISA income that arises and stays in the UK is outside the Indian net, which is the window to reorganise or draw it down. After that, an ISA is simply a taxable UK investment account in Indian eyes.

This is the one that costs people the most. When you crystallise a UK pension you can usually take 25 per cent as a tax-free lump sum, the Pension Commencement Lump Sum. That exemption is a UK rule, and India does not recognise it. So if you take the lump sum while you are an Indian resident, India can tax it as your income, and the mainstream position is that the full amount is taxable here because no Indian exemption covers a foreign pension lump sum.

The lever is timing, not a reliefs argument. If you take the lump sum before you become an Indian resident, or during your Resident but Not Ordinarily Resident window and keep it out of India, it stays outside the Indian net. Taken a year too late, the same 25 per cent that was tax-free in the UK becomes fully taxable in India. This is why the sequencing of a UK pension crystallisation against your return date is worth planning before you draw anything, not after.

Meena worked in the NHS and in private roles in the UK and has moved back to Bengaluru, now in her first ordinarily-resident year. She has a UK State Pension, an NHS pension paid by the NHS Business Services Authority, a SIPP she is about to start drawing, and a stocks-and-shares ISA.

Her State Pension and her NHS pension are both Article 20, taxable in India, because the NHS pension is paid by the NHSBSA and so counts as non-government; India taxes them at slab rates, with a credit for any UK tax withheld. Her ISA is now a plain taxable account: India taxes the dividends and gains inside it, and it goes in her Schedule FA. On the SIPP, her CA flags that the 25 per cent lump sum would be fully taxable in India if taken now, so if she had wanted it tax-free she needed to take it before returning or inside an RNOR year. Sorting this, Meena pays Indian tax on the pensions and the ISA income, claims credit for the UK tax, and avoids a lump-sum mistake that a UK-only view would have missed.